Developer | .Net | Umbraco

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When building a website, the optimal thing is that the users experience no downtime while a new version of the site is being deployed. This can however be quite complex to achieve in reality, and usually requires that you have multiple web servers.

The next best thing is that your users at least do not just get a browser showing nothing, while the page takes forever to load. While deploying, you could use the app_offline.htm, but that just blocks all requests, and when you remove it, the site still has not booted up.

If you have started using the “environments” feature in Google Tag Manager (if not, read why you should at Simo Ahava’s blogpost on environments), then maybe you’ve experienced some weird/confusing behaviour when using the preview/debug functions.

You may have also noticed the gtm_cookies_win=x in your tracking snippet.

Tracking snippet from the “Staging” environment.

After searching for information about the gtm_cookies_win parameter, and not finding anything, I decided to try and debug my way out of it.

When planning a new ecommerce website, you most likely have a budget. And of course you want to spend you money wisely, in order to get the most value in terms of design and features that will help you reach your goals.

Typically, when evaluating different platforms, it then makes sense to ask the question: “What do we get ‘out of the box’?”. And that is a perfectly valid concern. Anything that you can get included from the platform vendor logically means that you don’t have to pay your developers to write the same code.

But choosing to use those “out of the box” features might come a a different kind of price, depending on the the layer of the application they exist in. Let’s try and take a look at some examples.Read More »

Every year at work, we take a few days to try and do something different from our everyday work, and se if we can live up to the name of the even: “Innovation Camp”.

This year I decided to try and take a look at the concept of an open standard for user-centric click-once payments. The idea is that a customer can create his shopping basket as per usual, but when he is done, then he can transfer all his billing, shipping and payment information to the merchant/gateway with one click.Read More »

Afterwards a twitter debate followed, and as usual, much is lost in a debate limited to 140 char chunks. Basically the opinion was that if you use hashbang urls, you are the spawn of the devil, and you will kill all the kittens in the world ;).

I will try to present my argument why I think using hasbang urls can be an acceptable solution to a specific problem.Read More »

I just got my new Lumia 1020 which runs Windows Phone 8, and wanted to set up my Google stuff to sync with the phone. I use two factor auth, and after creating an application specific password, it synced up all my email, and my own calendars.

But my wife’s shared calendar did not show up, and given the history of issues between google and Windows Phone, I started searching for a solution. The Lumia 1020 is no longer using Active Sync, so all the old guides were no longer relevant. By pure luck, I stumbled on a post with this link:

As you might know, Umbraco 6 includes the MiniProfiler out of the box. This is great, as it gives everyone a chance to figure out what parts of your site might not be performing as well as they could. However, I discovered that sometimes the results that you get can be somewhat misleading, and I decided to dig into it a bit further.Read More »

I wanted to try and find a way to track all of the outgoing links on my blog, without haven to modify the html of the link. What I found was that using javascript listeners would probably be the best solution. Actually this technique can be used for a lot of stuff, but this is what I did: